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Product Description
Platform: PC/Mac
From the Manufacturer
The before-and-after comparison tool helps distinguish image adjustments (view larger).
Organize your photos by location (view larger).
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 Overview
The Lightroom 4 software helps you create amazing images that inspire, inform, and delight. Bring out the best in every shot with powerfully simple one-click adjustments and a full range of cutting-edge advanced controls. Craft elegant photo books and effortlessly share your best shots on social networks, in web galleries, and more. Perfect your images, organize all your photographs, and share your vision—all with one fast, intuitive application.
New for Lightroom 4
Highlight and Shadow Recovery - Bring out all the detail that your camera captures in dark shadows and bright highlights. Now you have more power than ever before to make great images in challenging lighting conditions.
Photo Book Creation - Create beautiful photo books from your images with a variety of easy-to-use templates included in Lightroom, and then upload your book for printing with just a few clicks.
Superior Image Processing - Get the absolute best from your images with state-of-the-art image processing controls. Make precise overall adjustments or correct targeted areas.
Extended Video Support - Organize, view, and make adjustments and edits to video clips. Play and trim clips, extract still images from them, or adjust clips with the Quick Develop tool.
Advanced Black-and-White Conversion - Gain powerful control over the tonal qualities that make or break black-and-white images. Precisely mix information from eight color channels when you convert to grayscale.
Superior Noise Reduction - Achieve amazing, natural-looking results from your high ISO images with state-of-the-art noise reduction technology. Apply noise reduction to the entire image or target specific areas.
One-Click Adjustments to Multiple Images - Save time when processing many images. Apply the same develop settings, exposure, or contrast, for example—to all the photographs in a group at once using presets or syncing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How does Adobe Photoshop Lightroom differ from Adobe Photoshop? - Adobe Photoshop Lightroom software provides all the tools you need for digital photography in one intuitive solution. Lightroom helps photographers work fast and efficiently, while maintaining the highest quality. Adobe Photoshop software is the industry standard in digital image editing, with advanced tools for detailed, pixel-level editing and working with multilayered files.
Q: Why should I use Lightroom if I already have Photoshop? - Lightroom is designed to boost your efficiency by handling all the tasks a digital photographer faces in one intuitive environment. It includes powerfully simple one-click adjustments, as well as the widest range of advanced tools for efficiently processing sets of images, organizing photo libraries, and sharing images.
| Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Comparison Chart | Lightroom 2 | Lightroom 3 | Lightroom 4 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Location-based photo organization | X | ||
| Extended video support | X | ||
| Importing libraries from other software | X | ||
| Highlight and shadow recovery | X | ||
| White balance brush | X | ||
| Additional adjustment brush options | X | ||
| Basic support for video files | X | X | |
| Improved watermarking | X | X | |
| Cross-platform 64-bit support | X | X | |
| Multiple monitor support | X | X | X |
| Simplified tone curve tools | X | X | X |
| Red-eye removal | X | X | X |
Highlight and Shadow Recovery
Before (view larger).
After highlight and shadow recovery (view larger).
System Requirements
Windows
- Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon 64 processor
- Microsoft Windows Vista with Service Pack 2 or Windows 7 with Service Pack 1
- 2GB of RAM
- 1GB of available hard-disk space
- 1024x768 display
- DVD-ROM drive
- Internet connection required for Internet-based services
Mac OS
- Multicore Intel processor with 64-bit support
- Mac OS X v10.6.8 or v10.7
- 2GB of RAM
- 1GB of available hard-disk space
- 1024x768 display
- DVD-ROM drive
- Internet connection required for Internet-based services
Create elegant photo books (view larger).
Product Description
Adobe. Photoshop. Lightroom. 4 software helps you create amazing
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
445 of 458 people found the following review helpful
Platform for Display:PC/Mac
Adobe Lightroom is Adobe's flag ship digital image development program. When I say "image development" I mean just that. Think of Lightroom as a digital darkroom and now you know what is possible in the software.
The first lesson you must learn when using Lightroom is... stop shooting in JPEG. Lightroom can do some amazing things, even with JPEGs, but if you want to enjoy the benefits Lightroom has to offer, you really need to shoot in RAW. You can pull some shadow and some highlight detail from JPEGs, but there is an order of magnitude difference in the amount of detail present in a RAW file.
The other thing to realize is that yes, if you have Photoshop, you can do everything Lightroom does. The difference, for now, is Lightroom 4 uses new controls not in Adobe Camera RAW (at the time of this writing - Adobe now offers a new Camera RAW version), which is where a lot of the new highlight/shadow recovery comes from, so for now Lightroom is quite a bit nicer than Photoshop in that regard. The other, most important piece, to remember is that Lightroom is designed from the ground up to only include the functionality you need for digital photography - you can't do advanced photo editing where you replace a goat's head with a person's or remove trees and so on. If you need that kind of software, buy Photoshop. If all you want is to develop your digital images as they were shot, with some spot removal tools, cropping and so on, Lightroom 4 is the place to be and the interface is designed with just these things in mind.
Next, if you are new to the product, check around the web for tutorials (Adobe has a few) and buy a book. You'll need it. The interface isn't horrible, but not all of the tools are intuitive enough that you can just pick it up and run. There is a lot of hidden power to be tapped and if all you want is to just skim the surface and not dig into the details, you might be better served with something like say, Photoshop Elements instead.
For users new to Lightroom, there are 7 modules now that you work with primarily. The first is the Library module. This is where you allow Lightroom to troll your hard drive looking for images (you can determine where it looks). This is where you would go to quickly find an image you've tagged (you can keyword tag your photos). The next module is Map. If you have a camera with GPS functionality or want to manually input the location data, you can use this module to locate your images on a map of the world. Next up is the Develop module. This is where all the magic is done. In this module you can choose white balance, change color temperature, change exposures, add sharpness, enhance shadows and highlights, perform lens correction and so on. It is amazingly powerful stuff. You then have the Book module, where you can create photo books in a streamlined manner and send it to Blurb for printing or create a PDF for printing wherever you might print books. Next up is Slideshow. Here you create Slideshows of images and can run it like a presentation with some added text and so on. Then there is the Print module. I still use Photoshop for printing since I know how to get the results I want from there, but I will be trying Lightroom again now that we have a new version. And finally you have the Web module that can be used to upload your photos automatically to many services you already likely use or have seen, such as Facebook.
So what's new/different between Lightroom 3 and 4? First up is the geo tagging. For those of you lucky enough to have GPS built into your camera (including camera phones!), you can now have Lightroom import this information and tag your photos according to your locations. This means you can search via say, Indiana and find all the photos there. The inclusion of a map function allows you to see where the photos were actually taken, so if you were in a pub taking photos in New York City, then found your way to another pub 10 miles away, your photos are separated by 10 miles (scale miles!) on the map so you know exactly where the photos were taken.
Next up is the book module. I've used this extensively in the beta, just to try it out, and it is fairly intuitive and easy to use. I haven't yet submitted a book for printing, but that is just a button click away as well. You can easily create books and send them off to Blurb (Adobe partnered with them) or print to PDF for printing elsewhere. The results are nice, but if you have to be in control of every aspect of the layout, InDesign is the way to go here.
You can now, if you are lucky enough to have a camera that does video, import and perform color/white balance corrections on DSLR video. I have seen it used and borrowed files from friends (my DSLR doesn't do video) and it works. It's not as easy to use as a dedicated video program, nor as robust, but it works. I watched a video on the Lightroom YouTube channel where they took a snap shot from a video, color corrected the photo then applied that correction to the video as well. I tried that out, and it works, but results aren't always what you want. You may be able to do it, but I haven't found it, but it seemed to me you had to apply the correction to the entire video, not just a scene. So those of you looking for video editing, you are better served with real editing software, not using Lightroom for this.
Another major improvement is highlight and shadow recovery. When used properly, you can actually pull detail out of a photo, even some JPEGs, you never would have thought was there. You can also do faux HDR with a single image instead of a series of images and, believe it or not, the results are actually quite nice (if you like HDR that is). The highlight/shadow recovery is similar to the sliders you knew and loved in Lightroom 3, only they are so much more powerful here.
When Adobe releases the next version of Photoshop, it will likely be amazing given how awesome Adobe Camera RAW seems to function in Lightroom.
So there are a couple questions you have to answer.
If you already own Lightroom 3, is it worth the upgrade for you? If you live your life in Lightroom 3 and rely on it for your livelihood, yes, buy 4 without question. The new highlight/shadow tools can work magic on your photos. For the rest of us who don't make our living and it's just a hobby, the question comes down to new functionality. If you like the idea of geo location of photos, the enhanced shadow/highlight functionality and video support, buy it. If Lightroom 3 gives the results you want and you're just a hobbyist, you may wish to wait or not spend the money at all.
If you don't have Lightroom already, should you buy this over Aperture? That depends. If you know Aperture and the functionality it offers, then Lightroom 4 may be a steeper learning curve for you. Personally I feel Lightroom gives ME better results, but I'm not an expert at Aperture and I've learned on Lightroom. If the option is DxO vs Lightroom, just buy Lightroom. It is worth the extra money.
If you want digital imaging software that allows complex cutting and editing, you don't want Lightroom.
One other nice feature of Lightroom 4 is the new pricing structure. The prices are set at a point where it actually makes sense, if you are a hobbyist and especially a professional, to move to Lightroom.
I give Adobe Lightroom 4 five stars. It does an amazing job, works really well and the details it can pull, even from JPEGs, is astonishing.
Adobe has hit a home run here.
ALSO- if you are on the fence, why not head over to Adobe's site and download the 30 day free trial? It's free and it doesn't hurt to try before buying for sure.
EDIT- you will need Adobe Camera RAW 6.7 Release Candidate to export to Photoshop with your adjustments. That's a bit annoying as LR4 should have been released with the latest Camera RAW download to avoid this mess.
EDIT2- Camera RAW is no longer beta. When you open Photoshop and try to import a Lr4 file, it should prompt to download the latest version of Camera RAW.
EDIT3- Adobe has finalized Lightroom 4.1 - make sure you download and install this as it fixes some performance issues. LR 4.2 is currently in release candidate mode (you can use LR 4.2 RC1 until Oct 31, 2012 if you want an extended "trial.")
EDIT - LR 4.2 is now available as a full release. It is no longer a release candidate. This update adds a lot of camera support along with some performance updates.
The first lesson you must learn when using Lightroom is... stop shooting in JPEG. Lightroom can do some amazing things, even with JPEGs, but if you want to enjoy the benefits Lightroom has to offer, you really need to shoot in RAW. You can pull some shadow and some highlight detail from JPEGs, but there is an order of magnitude difference in the amount of detail present in a RAW file.
The other thing to realize is that yes, if you have Photoshop, you can do everything Lightroom does. The difference, for now, is Lightroom 4 uses new controls not in Adobe Camera RAW (at the time of this writing - Adobe now offers a new Camera RAW version), which is where a lot of the new highlight/shadow recovery comes from, so for now Lightroom is quite a bit nicer than Photoshop in that regard. The other, most important piece, to remember is that Lightroom is designed from the ground up to only include the functionality you need for digital photography - you can't do advanced photo editing where you replace a goat's head with a person's or remove trees and so on. If you need that kind of software, buy Photoshop. If all you want is to develop your digital images as they were shot, with some spot removal tools, cropping and so on, Lightroom 4 is the place to be and the interface is designed with just these things in mind.
Next, if you are new to the product, check around the web for tutorials (Adobe has a few) and buy a book. You'll need it. The interface isn't horrible, but not all of the tools are intuitive enough that you can just pick it up and run. There is a lot of hidden power to be tapped and if all you want is to just skim the surface and not dig into the details, you might be better served with something like say, Photoshop Elements instead.
For users new to Lightroom, there are 7 modules now that you work with primarily. The first is the Library module. This is where you allow Lightroom to troll your hard drive looking for images (you can determine where it looks). This is where you would go to quickly find an image you've tagged (you can keyword tag your photos). The next module is Map. If you have a camera with GPS functionality or want to manually input the location data, you can use this module to locate your images on a map of the world. Next up is the Develop module. This is where all the magic is done. In this module you can choose white balance, change color temperature, change exposures, add sharpness, enhance shadows and highlights, perform lens correction and so on. It is amazingly powerful stuff. You then have the Book module, where you can create photo books in a streamlined manner and send it to Blurb for printing or create a PDF for printing wherever you might print books. Next up is Slideshow. Here you create Slideshows of images and can run it like a presentation with some added text and so on. Then there is the Print module. I still use Photoshop for printing since I know how to get the results I want from there, but I will be trying Lightroom again now that we have a new version. And finally you have the Web module that can be used to upload your photos automatically to many services you already likely use or have seen, such as Facebook.
So what's new/different between Lightroom 3 and 4? First up is the geo tagging. For those of you lucky enough to have GPS built into your camera (including camera phones!), you can now have Lightroom import this information and tag your photos according to your locations. This means you can search via say, Indiana and find all the photos there. The inclusion of a map function allows you to see where the photos were actually taken, so if you were in a pub taking photos in New York City, then found your way to another pub 10 miles away, your photos are separated by 10 miles (scale miles!) on the map so you know exactly where the photos were taken.
Next up is the book module. I've used this extensively in the beta, just to try it out, and it is fairly intuitive and easy to use. I haven't yet submitted a book for printing, but that is just a button click away as well. You can easily create books and send them off to Blurb (Adobe partnered with them) or print to PDF for printing elsewhere. The results are nice, but if you have to be in control of every aspect of the layout, InDesign is the way to go here.
You can now, if you are lucky enough to have a camera that does video, import and perform color/white balance corrections on DSLR video. I have seen it used and borrowed files from friends (my DSLR doesn't do video) and it works. It's not as easy to use as a dedicated video program, nor as robust, but it works. I watched a video on the Lightroom YouTube channel where they took a snap shot from a video, color corrected the photo then applied that correction to the video as well. I tried that out, and it works, but results aren't always what you want. You may be able to do it, but I haven't found it, but it seemed to me you had to apply the correction to the entire video, not just a scene. So those of you looking for video editing, you are better served with real editing software, not using Lightroom for this.
Another major improvement is highlight and shadow recovery. When used properly, you can actually pull detail out of a photo, even some JPEGs, you never would have thought was there. You can also do faux HDR with a single image instead of a series of images and, believe it or not, the results are actually quite nice (if you like HDR that is). The highlight/shadow recovery is similar to the sliders you knew and loved in Lightroom 3, only they are so much more powerful here.
When Adobe releases the next version of Photoshop, it will likely be amazing given how awesome Adobe Camera RAW seems to function in Lightroom.
So there are a couple questions you have to answer.
If you already own Lightroom 3, is it worth the upgrade for you? If you live your life in Lightroom 3 and rely on it for your livelihood, yes, buy 4 without question. The new highlight/shadow tools can work magic on your photos. For the rest of us who don't make our living and it's just a hobby, the question comes down to new functionality. If you like the idea of geo location of photos, the enhanced shadow/highlight functionality and video support, buy it. If Lightroom 3 gives the results you want and you're just a hobbyist, you may wish to wait or not spend the money at all.
If you don't have Lightroom already, should you buy this over Aperture? That depends. If you know Aperture and the functionality it offers, then Lightroom 4 may be a steeper learning curve for you. Personally I feel Lightroom gives ME better results, but I'm not an expert at Aperture and I've learned on Lightroom. If the option is DxO vs Lightroom, just buy Lightroom. It is worth the extra money.
If you want digital imaging software that allows complex cutting and editing, you don't want Lightroom.
One other nice feature of Lightroom 4 is the new pricing structure. The prices are set at a point where it actually makes sense, if you are a hobbyist and especially a professional, to move to Lightroom.
I give Adobe Lightroom 4 five stars. It does an amazing job, works really well and the details it can pull, even from JPEGs, is astonishing.
Adobe has hit a home run here.
ALSO- if you are on the fence, why not head over to Adobe's site and download the 30 day free trial? It's free and it doesn't hurt to try before buying for sure.
EDIT- you will need Adobe Camera RAW 6.7 Release Candidate to export to Photoshop with your adjustments. That's a bit annoying as LR4 should have been released with the latest Camera RAW download to avoid this mess.
EDIT2- Camera RAW is no longer beta. When you open Photoshop and try to import a Lr4 file, it should prompt to download the latest version of Camera RAW.
EDIT3- Adobe has finalized Lightroom 4.1 - make sure you download and install this as it fixes some performance issues. LR 4.2 is currently in release candidate mode (you can use LR 4.2 RC1 until Oct 31, 2012 if you want an extended "trial.")
EDIT - LR 4.2 is now available as a full release. It is no longer a release candidate. This update adds a lot of camera support along with some performance updates.
The manufacturer commented on the review below
119 of 123 people found the following review helpful
Platform for Display:PC/Mac
**SEE UPDATE AT BOTTOM OF REVIEW*
Lightroom 4 is a pretty major release for Adobe. They added some pretty significant features, changed a few of the features they had, and tweaked the image quality and rendering a bit. There is a LOT going on here and I'm not going to try to cover it all (the product description above does a good job). Instead, I am going to focus on what matters to me most - using Lightroom to edit professional images for clients.
I'm a professional wedding and portrait photographer and I've been using Lightroom since the release of Lightroom 2. It has since then become the bedrock of my editing routine, covering about 98% of my needs. The remaining 2% is mainly advanced touchup work and is handled by Photoshop CS5. I photograph about 30 weddings and 30-40 portrait sessions a year. I average about 1800 RAW photos per wedding and about 450 per portrait session. This puts my total workload at around 60,000 photos per year and every single one of them are handled by Lightroom.
So after using Lightroom 4 a bit, I am getting acclimated to its new image editing features and am very excited about the new tools. However my main grind at this point is that it is much slower than the version 3 it replaces.
My computer specs:
Intel 2600k overclocked to 4.4Ghz
8GB DDR3-1600 RAM
X-25M 80GB SSD (for lightroom libraries)
HD5670 video card
(multiple) 2TB hard drives for RAW image storage
This setup worked fairly well in the past. The very fast SSD handles the Libraries and the slower HDD handled the RAW files. Well, when I upgraded to LR4 the whole program seemed to slow down a bit, which was very frustrating to me. Everything from flipping through photos to toggling the editing tools in "develop" was sluggish. I had rendered ALL previews correctly and hid the histograms from the library view and thumbing through photos was still like trying to dance in the mud.
I had recently ordered a 120GB Corsair M4 SSD as my primary editing disk, and this would be a perfect time to give it a try. Maybe my 2TB HDDs were slowing down LR while they accessed my RAW files. I can confirm that with my RAW files on the Corsair M4 and my libraries on the X-25M SSD, the program is STILL slow. Between an 8-thread, 4.4ghz processor and two SSDs, I don't know what else I can do to get speed out of this program.
So culling and editing pictures in Lightroom 4 is a slower process than with Lightroom 3. This is a huge disappointment for me. For the working professional, time is money and for basic selection and editing, you will be spending more time with this new software than your old software in the past. I would gladly trade the geotagging or book making feature for an increase in speed.
Another issue to be aware of is that LR has changed the way it handled exposure adjustments. You now have the option of fine tuning recovery of Whites/Highlights/Shadows/Black tones within the adjustment panel. This is different than tone curve adjustments and acts more like an HDR tool. While these new adjustments are great, you need to upgrade your images to the 2012 process to take advantage of them. This will render your previous exposure presets all but useless. You will have to create new presets for the 2012 process. If you have a large number of presets, this is going to be tedious. On the upside, most of the other non-exposure based presets still work fine. If you prefer to keep your current tools and adjustments, you can stick with the 2010 process.
So, now that the bad is out of the way, what's good? Well, quite a bit. The new exposure tools are great. You also get a FULL RANGE of exposure and white balance tools through the local adjustment brush. This gives you a huge amount of creative control over your image that is unprecedented. Even Photoshop can't do this. Just one week in, I can tell you that the images edited with Lightroom 4 will look even better than the ones I edited with Lightroom 3 (even if it takes me longer to do it). For now that's a compromise I'll put up with.
In Summary, Lightroom is an exceptionally powerful editing tool which has improved since version 3. More features have been added and the existing features have been tweaked in a very useful way. However in the never-ending rush to add more features, the developers seemed to have lost sight of the fact that speed is very important to most end users. I also had LR crash on me last night for the first time in three years of usage. Fortunately my library was not corrupted and all of my editing adjustments were intact.
I expect many of these issues to be addressed with future updates, but it would have been nice had they taken a little longer and gotten it right to begin with. If you currently have version 3 and are on the fence about version 4, you would be forgiven for holding off until version 4.1. If you haven't tried Lightroom at all yet (or are on version 2), you are in for a real treat.
**UPDATE**
After using Lightroom for a couple weeks I seem to have isolated the speed issues to the Develop module. It seems as if sorting, flagging, and culling images in the "Library" module is acceptably quick (about equal to Lightroom 3) so long as you have the previews rendered for your images.
The develop module, on the other hand, is still quite sluggish. The program seems to be very lethargic at changing editing tools. Clicking on tool buttons (exposure, crop tool, etc) is no where near as responsive as it should be. Additionally, flipping to different images in "develop" is notably slower than it is in "library".
The slow downs here are due to a CPU bottleneck, not a hard drive bottleneck. My CPU is literally maxing out while trying to work quickly in the develop module. In this case you would want the fastest processor you can get your hands on. So long as you have an SSD for the libraries and good mechanical hard drive for the RAWs, you shouldn't be bottlenecked on the storage side of things.
I also seem to have found some sort of bug in the local adjustment brush tool. Lightroom 4 crashes on me nearly every editing session now and it's always when I'm using the local adjustment brush. Fortunately the libraries seem robust and I haven't lost any work.
**3-30-12 Lightroom 4.1 RC has been released**
I installed Lightroom 4.1RC yesterday and this fixed many of the issues I had in my original review. ALL of the speed issues relative to Lightroom 3.x have been resolved. I would now rate the programs about equal in speed (not fast, but sufficient). They also fixed the tone curve migration issue I mentioned earlier, as well as a few other bugs.
I can still confirm though that there is a bug in the adjustment brush which causes the program to crash. It's just an annoyance though (no work is being lost). Hopefully they isolate and take care of this soon.
Lightroom 4 is a pretty major release for Adobe. They added some pretty significant features, changed a few of the features they had, and tweaked the image quality and rendering a bit. There is a LOT going on here and I'm not going to try to cover it all (the product description above does a good job). Instead, I am going to focus on what matters to me most - using Lightroom to edit professional images for clients.
I'm a professional wedding and portrait photographer and I've been using Lightroom since the release of Lightroom 2. It has since then become the bedrock of my editing routine, covering about 98% of my needs. The remaining 2% is mainly advanced touchup work and is handled by Photoshop CS5. I photograph about 30 weddings and 30-40 portrait sessions a year. I average about 1800 RAW photos per wedding and about 450 per portrait session. This puts my total workload at around 60,000 photos per year and every single one of them are handled by Lightroom.
So after using Lightroom 4 a bit, I am getting acclimated to its new image editing features and am very excited about the new tools. However my main grind at this point is that it is much slower than the version 3 it replaces.
My computer specs:
Intel 2600k overclocked to 4.4Ghz
8GB DDR3-1600 RAM
X-25M 80GB SSD (for lightroom libraries)
HD5670 video card
(multiple) 2TB hard drives for RAW image storage
This setup worked fairly well in the past. The very fast SSD handles the Libraries and the slower HDD handled the RAW files. Well, when I upgraded to LR4 the whole program seemed to slow down a bit, which was very frustrating to me. Everything from flipping through photos to toggling the editing tools in "develop" was sluggish. I had rendered ALL previews correctly and hid the histograms from the library view and thumbing through photos was still like trying to dance in the mud.
I had recently ordered a 120GB Corsair M4 SSD as my primary editing disk, and this would be a perfect time to give it a try. Maybe my 2TB HDDs were slowing down LR while they accessed my RAW files. I can confirm that with my RAW files on the Corsair M4 and my libraries on the X-25M SSD, the program is STILL slow. Between an 8-thread, 4.4ghz processor and two SSDs, I don't know what else I can do to get speed out of this program.
So culling and editing pictures in Lightroom 4 is a slower process than with Lightroom 3. This is a huge disappointment for me. For the working professional, time is money and for basic selection and editing, you will be spending more time with this new software than your old software in the past. I would gladly trade the geotagging or book making feature for an increase in speed.
Another issue to be aware of is that LR has changed the way it handled exposure adjustments. You now have the option of fine tuning recovery of Whites/Highlights/Shadows/Black tones within the adjustment panel. This is different than tone curve adjustments and acts more like an HDR tool. While these new adjustments are great, you need to upgrade your images to the 2012 process to take advantage of them. This will render your previous exposure presets all but useless. You will have to create new presets for the 2012 process. If you have a large number of presets, this is going to be tedious. On the upside, most of the other non-exposure based presets still work fine. If you prefer to keep your current tools and adjustments, you can stick with the 2010 process.
So, now that the bad is out of the way, what's good? Well, quite a bit. The new exposure tools are great. You also get a FULL RANGE of exposure and white balance tools through the local adjustment brush. This gives you a huge amount of creative control over your image that is unprecedented. Even Photoshop can't do this. Just one week in, I can tell you that the images edited with Lightroom 4 will look even better than the ones I edited with Lightroom 3 (even if it takes me longer to do it). For now that's a compromise I'll put up with.
In Summary, Lightroom is an exceptionally powerful editing tool which has improved since version 3. More features have been added and the existing features have been tweaked in a very useful way. However in the never-ending rush to add more features, the developers seemed to have lost sight of the fact that speed is very important to most end users. I also had LR crash on me last night for the first time in three years of usage. Fortunately my library was not corrupted and all of my editing adjustments were intact.
I expect many of these issues to be addressed with future updates, but it would have been nice had they taken a little longer and gotten it right to begin with. If you currently have version 3 and are on the fence about version 4, you would be forgiven for holding off until version 4.1. If you haven't tried Lightroom at all yet (or are on version 2), you are in for a real treat.
**UPDATE**
After using Lightroom for a couple weeks I seem to have isolated the speed issues to the Develop module. It seems as if sorting, flagging, and culling images in the "Library" module is acceptably quick (about equal to Lightroom 3) so long as you have the previews rendered for your images.
The develop module, on the other hand, is still quite sluggish. The program seems to be very lethargic at changing editing tools. Clicking on tool buttons (exposure, crop tool, etc) is no where near as responsive as it should be. Additionally, flipping to different images in "develop" is notably slower than it is in "library".
The slow downs here are due to a CPU bottleneck, not a hard drive bottleneck. My CPU is literally maxing out while trying to work quickly in the develop module. In this case you would want the fastest processor you can get your hands on. So long as you have an SSD for the libraries and good mechanical hard drive for the RAWs, you shouldn't be bottlenecked on the storage side of things.
I also seem to have found some sort of bug in the local adjustment brush tool. Lightroom 4 crashes on me nearly every editing session now and it's always when I'm using the local adjustment brush. Fortunately the libraries seem robust and I haven't lost any work.
**3-30-12 Lightroom 4.1 RC has been released**
I installed Lightroom 4.1RC yesterday and this fixed many of the issues I had in my original review. ALL of the speed issues relative to Lightroom 3.x have been resolved. I would now rate the programs about equal in speed (not fast, but sufficient). They also fixed the tone curve migration issue I mentioned earlier, as well as a few other bugs.
I can still confirm though that there is a bug in the adjustment brush which causes the program to crash. It's just an annoyance though (no work is being lost). Hopefully they isolate and take care of this soon.
The manufacturer commented on this review
(What's this?)
Hi j. Howell,
The team has tracked down some performance fixes and tuning that will be available in build along with fixes for a few other top issues that were affecting users: http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/lightroom_4_update_from_the_team_update_scheduled_for_this_week
Jeff Tranberry
Adobe Systems, Product Manager, Customer Advocacy - Digital Imaging
The team has tracked down some performance fixes and tuning that will be available in build along with fixes for a few other top issues that were affecting users: http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_f
Jeff Tranberry
Adobe Systems, Product Manager, Customer Advocacy - Digital Imaging
77 of 90 people found the following review helpful
By TJ Snow
Platform for Display:PC/Mac
At first the program works pretty well; however, as with Adobe LR3 after a period of time the program will slow to a snails crawl when loading newer photos to your catalog, or when executing functions within the program. My system is a Intel with an i7 processor/16 GB memory on the board/ 1 TB hard drive/running Windows 7; as you can see, I should not have any issues with memory or disk space. After spending an extensive amount of time with a customer service representative from Adobe trying to troubleshoot the issues that I am currently having, the conclusion from Adobe was, the Lightroom product has known issues for being sluggish, and the software engineers are currently working on the problem. The representative also stated, I would have to wait until version 4.2 to be released for any fixes regarding sluggish performance. Currently there is no firm date on when version 4.2 will be released; other than they are currently working on the issue. So as of now I have an expensive useless program on my computer. Any advice that I should give to anyone who's considering this program, hold off for now until Adobe gets this bug fixed, if it gets fixed.
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